Category: Church Life

The men’s Bible study I am a part of at my church is going through the Gospel of Matthew. We’re just getting started so I was reflecting on Matthew 3 this week. John the Baptist comes along and Matthew identifies him as the one crying out in the wilderness.

“I pastored a Southern Baptist church in southern Missouri, and there some people in that church whose whole identity, I think, was tied to a self-righteous image. I discovered quickly I couldn’t change things when folks were determined not to change. In time, though, I realized that all around the church was a sea of dying people. I made friends outside the church and found plenty of people who were receptive to me.” — Dallas Willard in Becoming Dallas Willard by Gary Moon

The past few weeks have been heavy news for the Church. For evangelicals… it’s been Willow Creek and the leadership failure of that megachurch. (Then there are those trying to cling to evangelical as “tribe” but the politics of it right now are a bad mess.)

Between the vestibule and the altarlet the priests, the ministers of the Lord, weepand say, “Spare your people, O Lord,and make not your heritage a reproach,a byword among the nations.Why should they say among the peoples,‘Where is their God?’” (Joel 2:17, ESV) Continue reading “Dealing with the sin of church leadership”→

“…the interior life of the Church is then one of selfless love so fully exercised that, within its communion, the structure of its ministries coincides exactly with that of interpersonal relationships and the whole is the visible manifestation of a community that so gives itself unselfishly in love and service that it cannot fail to touch the world outside, both as a community as through its individual members who perhaps spend their lives principally among non-Christians as ‘children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world’ (Phil. 2:15).” — Hans Urs von Balthasar, Engagement with GodContinue reading “The power of the Church in this world”→